Michael W. Meister, Access and Axes of Indian Temples.
Thresholds 32 (2006):
33-35.
American Architecture as Cultural Model
An element of fantasy reigns over many Russian
perceptions of American architecture, even those
expressed in the pages of solid professional journalsnot
to mention the more imaginative, if less reliable, passages
from literary works such as Maksim Gorkiis City of
the Yellow Devil (1906). This air of unreality must be
attributed in part to the different levels of development
between Russia and America at the time, and to the great
distance separating the two countries. Yet for all of these
limitations, there is evidence to suggest that the extensive
Russian reporting on American architecture established
a receptivity to technology that would continueand
in some respects increaseafter the revolution, despite
barriers to exchanges of information.38
Beyond the specific function of America as a model in
civil engineering and architectural design, there is the
broader issue of cultural perception, which Zodchii was
uniquely qualified to convey. Although technical concerns
are of obvious importance to members of the architectural
profession, architecture as an art and as a building
technology also participates in the social and cultural
values of the environment that it shapes. In this respect,
Russian reports and articles on American architecture
reveal a continual measuring. America is seen as the
ultimate standard, regardless of Russias more immediate
relation to Europe. Paradoxically, this taking of measure
reflects, on a deeper level, a type of nationalism that seeks
a model commensurate with its own aspirations. Only
America, with its continental sweep and boundless energy,
provided a comparable scale for the challenges confronting
Russian builders.
No other form of endeavor in Russia expressed this
relation to America as clearly as architecture, with
its emphasis on both the pragmatic and the cultural.
Whatever suspicions Russian thinkers such as Dostoevskii
might harbor toward American culture, the material
from Zodchii suggests that the two countries have often
perceived in each other a set of values and characteristics
that are tacitly admired and accepted as ones own. Hence
the willingness of Russian observers to repeat the terms
of American boosterismcolossal, enormous, and reminiscent of those in Zodchii. Bystreeznachit pribylnei (Faster means more
fasteven while offering skeptical comments. These are
the terms that have appealed to the Russians own sense
of destinyterms that, despite immeasurable social and
cultural differences, indicate in the broadest sense the
presence of shared ideals.
32
Notes
1. Fedor M. Dostoevskji, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad:
Nauka, 1980), 21:106.
2. For a history of the foundation of the Moscow Architectural Society, see Iu. S.
laralov, ed. 100 let obshchestvennykh arkhitekturnykh organizatsii V SSSR, 1867-
1967 (Moscow: Soiuz arkhitektorov, 1967), 6-11.
3. Iaralov, ed., 100 let, 12.
4. The complicated publishing history of Zodchii and its supplement Nedelia
stroitelia is presented in Iaralov, ed. 100 let, 103-4.
5. Zodchii, 1872, no. 3: 46.
6. Ibid., 1873, no. 9: 110, based on material taken from Birzhevye vedomosti.
7. Ibid., 1873, no. 9: 107-8.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 1873, no. 7-8: 94.
10. See Zodchii, 1876, no. 7:85, based on material from Armenian Architect and
Building News.
11. Ibid., no. 11-12: 120.
12. Ibid., 1877, no. 3: 29-30.
13. Ibid., 1880, no. 3-4: 33.
14. Ibid., no. 6: 49-50.
15. Nedelia stroitelia, 1885, no. 15: 3.
16. Ibid., 1891, no. 3-4: 20.
17. Ibid., no. 39-40: 385-86.
18. Ibid., no. 26: 288.
19. Ibid., 1892, no. 46: 313.
20. Ibid., 1893, no. 1: 2-3, and no. 3:10-Il.
21. Ibid., no. 14: 62.
22. Ibid., 1895, no. 29:155; the article is entitled Sky Cities.
23. Ibid., 1903, no. 51: 605-8.
24. Ibid., 1904, no. 8: 86-89, and no. 11:137-38, with material from Deutsche
Bauzeitung.
25. Ibid., no. 17: 207-8.
26. Ibid., no. 26: 303.
27. Ibid., no. 39: 431-35, with numerous photographs of tall buildings standing
among the ruins.
28. Ibid., 1908, no. 40: 375.
29. Ibid., 1912, no. 46: 455-59; no. 47: 467-70; and no. 48: 479-81.
30. Ibid., 1912, no. 52: 522.
31. See E. I. Kirichenko, Moskva: Pamiatniki arkhitektury 1830-1910-kh godov
(Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1977), 95-99.
32. The tower has survived very well in contemporary Moscow. See photograph
in William Craft Brumfield, The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 284.
33. Zodchii, 1913, no. 18: 203-11, and no. 19: 215-21.
34. Ibid., no. 18:204.
35. Compare to Korolevas report on papers read at the technology section of the
Fifth Congress, Zodchii, 1914, no. 3: 27.
36. Ibid., 1916, no. 46: 412-16, and the three subsequent issues, with floor plans,
photographs, and a bibliography.
37. Ibid., 1917, no. 47-52: 226-29.
38. Extensive reports based on personal observations of American architecture
began appearing again in the Russian architectural press in the 1980s. For example,
Stroitelnaia gazeta published an interview with a faculty member at the Leningrad
Engineering and Construction Institute, who had visited American construction
sites in 1985 and gave a positive account of what he saw. Even the terms used are
profitable), Stroitelnaia gazeta, March 3 1987: 3.
Figure 1. Elephanta, Maharashtra,
Shaivite cave, sanctum with
lingam, ca. 540 A.D. Figure 2. Elephanta, ground plan
Michael W. Meister
Access and Axes of Indian Temples
At the beginning, before the creation of the world, sex, and
death, the Creator Prajapati formed Rudra-Brahma as a
pillar to separate sky and water and to start time. This
pillar, called Skambha (the frame of creation), instead
retreated to the bottom of the cosmic ocean, and waited for
procreation to begin by other means. By how much did
Skambha enter the existent? How much of him lies along
that which will exist? asks the sacred Hindu text Atharva
Veda (AV X.7.9).1 First built more than a millennium
after the Atharva Veda was compiled, an early Indian
stone temple echoes Skambhas condensed crouching form.
The cubical block of the sanctum in the famed sixth-
century A.D. Shaiva cave on Elephanta island near
Mumbai lies compressed between the floor and ceiling
of a mountain excavation (Fig. 1). Its four cardinal
doorways are protected by giant guardian figures. This
cella can be approached from two directions: on axis
from an eastern court along the central aisle of a pillared
hall, or indirectly, from the north, along an axis facing
an immense bust of the Great Lord Mahadeva Shiva,
incarnate with cardinal faces (Fig. 3). This Shiva image
rests within the mountain, as if looking into the caves
excavation from beyond a southern entry-portico2 (Fig. 2).
Access to early temples was at first limited to the deity
and its cult functionaries. Temple 17, built at Sanchi (an
early first-century Buddhist site) ca. 425 A.D., has often
been called the earliest surviving stone Hindu temple,
Figure 3. Elephanta, image of
Shiva Mahadeva
intended to shelter an icon of a deity (Fig. 4). It consists
of a small masonry cube with an inner sanctum and four-
pillared portico, suitable for the approach of only one
person at a time. Such a temple was a point of power,
seen as a crossing (tirtha), a mechanism for seducing
the divine into the created world, and a tool for the
transformation of the worshiper.
This manifestation of the divine was gradually marked
on temple walls by axes in the ground plan that project
sacred interior spaces onto offsets of the exterior walls,
providing facets where sculptures of varying aspects of the
divinity and creation could be placed and viewed
(Figs. 5 & 6). In some temples in the seventh century,
however, these cardinal projections show shuttered doors
rather than images, emphasizing the secure nature of
the shrine and limiting visual access of the deity to those
whose function was to administer to it in the
sanctum (Figs. 7 & 8).
Image-worship increasingly replaced rites of sacrifice
by the seventh and eighth centuries, and temple rituals
began to focus more on the role of an audience of devotees
and the experience of worship. The cosmological plan
of the temple expanded, but access to the shrine and
sanctum remained limited and controlled. These temples
were monuments of manifestation3 in Stella Kramrischs
words!cosmic mountains, but also markers of creation,
palaces of the gods, and machines for social order
33
Figure 4. Sanchi, Madhya Figure 5. Projection of sacred space onto walls of the temple: Bhubaneshwar, Orissa,
Pradesh, temple 17, ca. 425 Parasurameshvara temple, ca. 600 (left); Mahua, MP, Shiva temple no. 1, ca. 650-75

Figure 6. Bhubaneshwar, Figure 9. Masrur, Himachal Pradesh, Shaivite temple, Figure 8. Sirpur, Lakshmana temple,
Parasurameshvara temple, ca. 725-75, section view from southwest
south view

Figure 7. Sirpur, Chattisgarh, Lakshmana Figure 10. Masrur, ground plan Figure 11. Expansion of temple plans: North
temple, wall with blind shutters, ca. 600-25 and South IndiaGibbs and Colen Campbell

34
Figure 12. Vishnupur, Bengal. Eastern India in the 17th century
(Figs. 9 & 10). Temple Hinduism gradually took on
political and social roles that transformed the temple,
expanding its plan along a path of human approach,
an axis of access. As architecture and changing usage
evolved over many centuries, open halls were added to
walled halls, additional pavilions were built, enclosing
fences became compounds, and compounds grew to cities.
In South India, seasonal festivals and rites evolved that
brought the deity out into the city and countryside, giving
access to populations not allowed entry to the sanctum
(Fig. 11).
As I have noted elsewhere, The Hindu temple must also
act as access and approach for aspirants and worshipers.
This role changes the temple from a centralized,
bilaterally symmetrical structure (reflecting the nature of
the cosmogonic process) to one with a defined longitudinal
axis. On that axis the worshipers approach their personal
divinity within the sanctum; but also on that axis the
aspirants increasingly can place themselves, in halls built
for that purpose, as if under the umbrella of the sacrificer,
positioning themselves for ascent.4
Two alignments, however, coexist. One is centralized,
symmetrical, and expresses a cosmic order in which the
deity dwells. The other is linear, signifying the approach
of humans in this world. In seventeenth-century Bengal, a
new type of temple was created, built in brick, for rituals
hidden from Islamic hegemony. These temples retain
an east-west axis for priests to enter the sanctum and
attend to the god. But they also have a north-south axis
to provide visual access to an assembly of devotees who
sing and dance in the temples court, emphasizing the
participation of the community (Fig. 12).5 These temples
take on the form of a village compound. Such dual axes for
esoteric and popular rituals had already been augured at
Elephanta (see Fig. 3), yet here communities of worshipers
commanded access that in previous centuries had often
been limited or denied.
Figure 13. Osian, Rajasthan, Sachiyamata hill, temple
complex, 8th20th century
The remarkable thing is that the once-closed machine
of the temple has, over time, taken on the flexibility to
adapt to radically changing social circumstances, giving
access to a variety and multitude of communities (Fig. 13).
Even as the Creator Prajapatis Skambha cowered in the
primordial waters long ago, the potential for creation of
the sexually charged, multivalent, multicultural universes
served by Hindu temples had become its ordering force.6
Early Hinduism focused on rites of sacrifice. Temples
to shelter images of deities were built in early medieval
India as instruments of priestly cults. To patronize cult
communities became a means to extend kingship. Yet
through such community patronage, temples gradually
became public institutions.7 Today communities have
taken the place of kings, and temples function in fresh
ways, with a renewal of multiple pivots of access.
Notes
1. Atharva-veda Samhita, trans. William Dwight Whitney, rev. and ed. Charles
Rockwell Lanman, Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 78 (Cambridge: Harvard
University, 1905).
2. Stella Kramrisch, The Presence of Siva (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1981), 443-68.
3. Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1946),
passim.
4. Michael W. Meister, Temple: Hindu Temples, in The Encyclopedia of Religion,
ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company) vol. 14, 372: The
whole intention of the Vedic Tradition and of the sacrifice is to define the Way by
which the aspirant can ascend [the three] worlds, wrote Ananda Coomaraswamy.
Earth, Air, and Sky compose the vertical Axis of the Universe. [These are] the
Way by which the Devas first strode up and down these worlds and the Way for
the Sacrificer now to do likewise.
5. Pika Ghosh, Temple to Love, Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century
Bengal (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), 138.
6. Michael W. Meister, Sweetmeats or Corpses? Community, Conversion, and
Sacred Places, in Open Boundaries, Jain Communities and Cultures in Indian
History, ed. John E. Cort (Albany: State University of New York, 1998), 111-38.
7. Arjun Appadurai, Kings, Sects and Temples in South India, 13501700 A.D., in
South Indian Temples, ed. Burton Stein (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978),
47-73.
35
Double-click here to edit text.
A project by OJ Studio: Neri Oxman and Mitchell Joachim
PeristalCity: A Circulatory Habitat Cluster
for Manhattan
New York Citys first skyscraper, or what might be
considered as such, was built in 1902 (Flatiron building).
Since then, skyscrapers have come to define the citys
distinctive skyline. Despite their captivating image,
skyscrapers in New York City (as well as in other
cities throughout the world) have not yet overcome the
limitations of their most basic function: the vertical
navigation of their inhabitants.
The elevators in these buildings have long constrained
compositional forms. More significantly, these elevators
limit the arrangement of social practices with regards
to both labor and leisure. But elevators stifle more than
just our movement by virtue of their rectangular rigid
planes and fleeting cars. Temporally speaking, the vast
space of the elevator shaft is almost always vacant,
and thus useless. But suppose we embraced a different
36
Soft pod skin and muscle
interpretation of that inactive and sequestered domain
which much of this central shaft represents. It would
demand a vital shift, or at least a conceptual reworking,
towards an active utilization of such a space. This
possibility is precisely what our design explores.
By substituting a dynamic spatial application for the
traditional organization of a skyscrapers core, we
dissolve the dichotomy between circulation and static
habitable environments. We have eliminated typological
stacking where limited social practices are allocated
to different floors. Instead, we propose a spatial layout
that establishes heterogeneous movements, and not
just assorted practices, as the criteria for a dynamic
assemblage. The following set of statements will explain
how this is envisioned:
Double-click here to edit text.

Front view of sky surface and urban cluster

37